2004 October

Two more countries join the International Commons discussion and drafting process today: South Africa and Belgium. Check out the drafts, subscribe to the lists, and congratulate your local Project Lead on making it all possible.

A new site called P2P Politics is now live. The site enables anyone to select from a menu of video clips the ones that best express their view of the U.S. presidential elections, and then email links to those clips, along with a personalized message, to friends, family, and colleagues. It is like a cross between an online greeting-card service and a gallery of campaign advertisements, and all content is Creative Commons licensed and hosted at the Internet Archive. Learn more. (Like Creative Commons, the site is nonpartisan and seeking content from across the ideological spectrum; it looks as though their seed content is heavy on the incumbent, but they seem to be actively pursuing other viewpoints right off the bat.)

We have a long-standing specification for embedding licenses in MP3 audio files which requires two pieces of information: a license claim embeddded in the audio file, and verification metadata hosted on a web page. While command-line tools for looking up the verification metadata have been available for a while, we have lacked an easy, drag and drop solution for examining an embedded claim and whether or not it verifies. No more.

ccLookup is tool available for Mac OS X and Windows which allows you to drop an MP3 file onto the program icon or running window in order to verify the embedded claim, if any. Downloads are available here.

While ccLookup is a step in the right direction, there’s still work to be done. Ogg support would be nice, and I’m sure there are features I haven’t thought of. Have a comment, suggestion or idea? Email me at nathan@creativecommons.org and let me know.

If you can’t be bothered to open up your web browser and head over to our search engine, but still have a hankering for licensed content, there’s good news. Well, good news if you run Mac OS X. We now have a Creative Commons Search channel for Sherlock

The Creative Remix, with host Benjamen Walker, is an hour-long “lawyer free” examination of the art, culture, and history of the remix. The hour kicks off with a musical analysis of DJ Dangermouse’s infamous remix of the Beatles and Jay-Z. Then we go back in time to check out the ancient Roman art of the poetry mash-up, or the Cento. Then we rewind to the 18th century to check out the birth of copyright and how it affected writers like Alexander Pope; and the early 20th century when the visual artist Marcel Duchamp used the remix to reinvent everything. We also take a field trip to the Mass Mocca museum of modern art to check out the exhibit “Yankee Remix.” Walker brings along a few grad students and a pair of curmudgeonly New England antique collectors to investigate different attitudes towards remixing.

In the second part of the program Walker speaks with three unique remix artists: The historical novelist Matthew Pearl, Gideon D’arcangelo (“The Walkman Buster”), and Cory Arcangel, a Nintendo hacker — and one of the youngest representatives at this year’s Whitney Biennial.

Getting rights OK’d can be frustrating for artists, be they authors seeking to quote an essay or documentary filmmakers who’ve got snippets of pop songs playing in the background of key scenes. Artists and scholars who believe the current copyright system unduly stifles creativity are pushing a less restrictive alternative that they call the Creative Commons.

Driving the movement is the belief that we all benefit when creative minds are free to expand upon others’ work – that public discourse is hurt when too much of it is weighed down by the baggage of commerce.

Adherents of Creative Commons are a varied lot. They include MIT, the Beastie Boys, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, newspaper columnist Dan Gillmor and the British Broadcasting Corp.

I would take issue with that “baggage of commerce” bit, and re-write it like this: “Public discourse and commerce are hurt when too much is weighed down by the baggage of needless legal friction.” But otherwise it’s a gem.

Bodies packed Bar 56 in Ottawa’s Byward Market last week for the launch of the first Canadian version of a Creative Commons license. Hosted by the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) and the Law & Technology Program, the event unfurled the CC banner to a jubilant crowd eager to support the cause.

Canadians let you know that they’re having a really good time at their parties. Greetings ranged from the hearty violence of a lumberjack’s bear hug to the sophisticated cheek-pecking of a Quebecoise. Unlike the hip reserve of the Wired concert event, or the casual certainty of CC San Francisco events, this crowd showed the honest pride of hardy mountaineers who have finally reached the crest. Perhaps this is because Ottawans are still close enough to the frontier to reflect the pioneer spirit. Satisfaction was rampant and celebration well-deserved.

Michael Geist and Pippa Lawson deserve credit for supporting the CC effort in Canada. CA project lead Marcus Bornfreund and his team of researchers are doing more than merely crafting a CC license that is truly Canadian. The next goal is to develop a license template that is less US-centric using terms that are more common internationally. I’m looking forward to hearing more from this energetic group of outstanding scholars.